Introduction

• Consider the information from the JS7 - Impact of an Agent outage article.
• For information about the behavior in case of outages see JS7 - FAQ - What happens to workflows in case of outage of an Agent?

Troubleshooting

The Agent is the component in JS7 that executes workflows, stores information about execution results and order state transitions in its journal and passes results to the Controller. The outage of an Agent prevents execution of workflows.

Troubleshooting starts from the fact that users reproduce and locate a problem in order to better know the nature of the problem:

• As a first step check the Agent's log file agent.log and watchdog.log, see JS7 - Log Files and Locations.
  • Warnings and errors can be found from the output qualifiers WARN and ERROR in a log file.
  • Example
    • 2021-10-10T09:53:04,939 WARN js7.base.session.SessionApi - HttpAgentApi(https://apmacwin:4345): HTTP 401 Unauthorized: POST https://apmacwin:4344/controller/api/session => InvalidLogin: Login: unknown user or invalid password
• Due to log rotation log files of previous days are available in a compressed .tar.gz format on a daily basis, see JS7 - Log Rotation.
  • For Unix the zcat command can be used to directly access compressed log files.
  • For Windows compressed files have to be extracted, for example by use of 7-zip.
• Users should consider that an Agent instance can report problems related to other components such as Controller instances and JOC Cockpit. In this situation it is recommended to check the component's log files.
• Should warnings or error messages not be evident then users should do some research: the Product Knowledge Base and the Change Management System offer a search box, browsers offer access to search engines.
• Having completed analysis of a problem and being certain that the problem is related to a product defect and not to resources of the IT environment then
  • customers of a commercial license should use the Support Resources including the SOS ticket system.
  • users of the open source license are invited to use Community Resources.
• Should the agent.log file not provide sufficient information to reproduce a problem then users should consider to increase the log level, see JS7 - Log Levels and Debug Options.

In some situations, for example if computer memory is not sufficient for the heap size of the Agent's Java Virtual Machine, the outage of an Agent instance can be handled by restarting the instance. However, problems indicating insufficient resources typically require better sizing of resources.

If the problem is related to server resources and if operation of the Agent cannot be continued on the same server then relocation of the Agent instance can be a last means to fight an outage. Relocation includes to copy/move the Agent instance's JS7_AGENT_DATA/state directory to an Agent instance on a new server. This directory holds the Agent instance's journal. To relocate an Agent instance the journal files can be copied to the new Agent instance. Refer to the JS7 - How to relocate an Agent article for the steps to apply.